On The verge of the American female gothic: Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The fall of the house of Usher’ in Susan Glaspell’s theater

This essay traces intertextualities between Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” and three plays by American playwright Susan Glaspell (1876-1948) that never before had been discussed under the light of the Female Gothic: Close the Book, Chains of Dew and The Verge. This essay, through the close r...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autor: Hernando Real, Noelia
Tipo de recurso: capítulo de libro
Fecha de publicación:2018
País:España
Institución:Universidad Autónoma de Madrid
Repositorio:Biblos-e Archivo. Repositorio Institucional de la UAM
Idioma:inglés
OAI Identifier:oai:repositorio.uam.es:10486/710160
Acceso en línea:http://hdl.handle.net/10486/710160
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palabra clave:Susan Glaspell
Edgar Allan Poe
Female Gothic
Modernism
Filología
Descripción
Sumario:This essay traces intertextualities between Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” and three plays by American playwright Susan Glaspell (1876-1948) that never before had been discussed under the light of the Female Gothic: Close the Book, Chains of Dew and The Verge. This essay, through the close reading of Poe’s and Glaspell’s fictional spatial locations, the imagery of enclosure and destruction and the symbolic stature of their protagonists, argues that Glaspell recycles and revamps the American Gothic for the theater while bearing the flag of her own feminist and artistic purposes. Indeed, it is argued that Glaspell’s plays function as Gothic allegories, in which the playwright employs hallmark Gothic conventions to present the constraints of traditional art forms and of female literary imagination releasing the modern woman writer’s artistic, social, psychological and domestic confinement